zerobrew brings uv-style architecture to Homebrew packages
A 100x faster* alternative to homebrew
zerobrew is a Homebrew alternative for macOS and Linux that claims up to 100x faster installs. Benchmarks show 100 packages installing 6.6x faster cold and 68x faster warm, with 24 packages hitting 100x or more warm. It supports install, bundle, upgrade, and garbage collection commands, and can be installed via curl or Homebrew itself.
zerobrew brings uv-style architecture to Homebrew packages on macOS and Linux.
- deanc
I don't agree with everything that Homebrew does, but the primary maintainers are visible, vocal and very opinionated. They have shown credibility and earnt my trust over the years given it is a crucial entry point to potential malware to my system.
Homebrew has continued to improve performance each major version. It's certainly a lot quicker nowadays than 5 years ago. I want reliability and safety in a package manager, speed is nice to have.
I applaud competition, but something like this starts with trust zero as far as I'm concerned. If there is one place that I want human input over LLM it's here. It needs to scream: smart humans are in control and overseeing the project. I don't see that here.
- Jaydenaus
You can also now use mise as a homebrew replacement, although I don't think there's any claims/benchmarks around performance https://mise.jdx.dev/bootstrap/packages/brew.html
- nine_k
"Alternative to homebrew (the CLI utility)" -> "Frontend to Homebrew (the package system)".
Along these lines, I wonder when somebody will come up with a "universal package manager" that factors out the dependency resolution, content-addressable store, packing / unpacking, file manipulation, signatures, etc. Small plugins, maybe just declarative descriptions, would suffice to connect it to stores like npm, homebrew, pypi, maybe even cargo and nixpkgs.
- BugsJustFindMe
> "zerobrew does the relocation in-process and links from a content-addressed store"
Ok, but why a new app for that instead of a PR for brew?
- potamic
What's the significance of warm speedup in the benchmarks? For most new installs, cache would mostly be empty, shouldn't the cold numbers be more significant for day to day use?